Baseball May Be Learning -- Scheduling Dept.

Major League Baseball, the same people who bring you a wonderful game, but with atrocious incapacity to market it properly (q.v. the overblown Jackie Robinson Day player numbering, the archaic blackout rules, ribbons for everything, you name it), has done it again.

You may find here the schedule for 2018, just released.  Now, let us first point out that the season starts on March 29th, a Thursday.  That is a change driven not by greed or stupidity but by the latest Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with the players (so yes, greed and stupidity are baked in), which mandates that the teams get four additional scheduled days off during the year.  Those are the rules, that's the way it goes.  So instead of starting the season with one game on a Sunday in early April, it will start on a Thursday in late March.

That, however, is the trigger to this column, which surprisingly had assumed that since Baseball is typically an idiot, they would screw this up like they do the blackout rules.

But wait, they didn't.  For the most part.

I have been advocating loudly for like, ever, that it is almost as uncomfortable for fans to watch baseball on TV in 39-degree weather (3.89 degrees for you Centigrade types) as it is for the players and the fans in the stands.  Can you imagine paying like $2,500 for a seat in Yankee Stadium to freeze your glutei off for nine long, slow typical-Yankee-game innings?  I mean, I wouldn't go up to New York for $2,500, but I still get it.  I wouldn't go to New York for anything, let's get that right.

And I have always railed at Baseball for its refusal to accommodate the weather by starting all early-season games (at least the first 1-2 series) in the southernmost cities and those with domed stadiums.  This past year, the Boston Red Sox, one of the northernmost-based teams and without a dome on old Fenway Park, opened at home against Pittsburgh.  The temperature was 48 degrees, nice for football but miserable for baseball.  The second game of the series (the third was postponed by weather, duh) was played in 40 degrees.

So I was all prepared to write this column hollering about how stupid Baseball was yet again.  But perhaps some actual thought went into it this year, or they were just lucky.  The home teams for the opening series this year, and there are of course 15 home teams, include Tampa Bay, Texas, Miami, Kansas City, Baltimore, Atlanta, LA, Toronto, San Diego, Oakland, Seattle and Arizona.  It also includes Cincinnati, which is not that far south but always opens at home as the oldest franchise.  We get that.

Toronto and Seattle have domes; the rest are in warmer cities less likely to have, you know, 40-degree weather.  To be honest, out of 15 games, I could take issue only with the fact that the Mets and Tigers, in New York and Detroit, are playing home games in what is likely to be cold weather, while Houston, Anaheim and San Francisco are on the road instead of capitalizing on their weather.  I'm sure that could have been adjusted, but if only two games are seriously likely to be played in ice boxes, well, that's pretty good.

I checked, for fun, the second set of series, which would start the following Monday on about what would have been opening day in past years.  Five teams from the 15 home teams are in places that shouldn't be hosting that early.  Again, I have to salute Baseball, if only because the "soft bigotry of low expectations" tells us that for them to have only 2-3 bad choices of home cities is such an improvement that we have to smile.  I guess.

Now perhaps they can jump on that blackout thing.  I've already offered to be a consultant to MLB on that topic, if only they will take me up on it.  Might even be willing to go to New York, but only for a few days at a time.  That place is scary.

Fascinating week, eh?

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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